‘Since when were lots of people right about anything?’ She tutted and brushed the make-up artist’s hand away to check the eye make-up. When she didn’t insult it, I thought the woman was going to cry with joy. ‘Nonetheless, I know what I saw and if he wants to fuck you in that ensemble, he must really want to fuck you.’
‘Myrna!’
‘Don’t Myrna me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to hear your excuses because I’ve heard every single one of them and they’re thinner than Greta Garbo after six months eating broiled grapefruit for dinner. “I’m leaving tomorrow, we don’t really know each other, he’s too good-looking”, all nonsense. You quite clearly adore him.’
My shoulders were tight with a tension that had been there all day, slowly ratcheting up and up and up until I could hear my collarbones grinding into dust.
‘Heistoo good-looking,’ I said. ‘You saw him. He’s gorgeous, too handsome for his own good. Too handsome for me.’
At that, Myrna waved the make-up artist away and snapped her fingers to get my attention.
‘That attitude will get you nowhere. The world is full of ugly men who bedded and, even worse, married the most stunning, the most beautiful women.’
I considered her words, sharp as a knife and historically accurate.
‘Do you think they sat around thinking, she’s far too attractive for me, I really ought to keep my dick in my pants? Because they didn’t. The number of movies and television shows where a hideous troll of a man goes home to an earth-shattering example of womanhood astounds me still.’
‘Marge is significantly hotter than Homer,’ I admitted.
‘And that’s even before we start talking about the musicians,’ she went on. Possibly not a big fan ofThe Simpsons. ‘All those foul little boys who don’t know how to wash, sitting in their bedrooms writing songs about women who are obsessed with them? Darling, show me these women? No one wanted a bar of them until they stood on stage with a guitar. They wrote it into being. You need to go into life with that kind of attitude. When you tell yourself someone is too handsome, too smart, too whatever it might be, to be interested in you, what you’re really saying is that you’re not good enough to be with them. And if you’re not on your own team, why would anyone else join it?’
She paused for breath, her make-up artist standing to one side, looking as though she didn’t know whether to give her a round of applause or burst into tears.
‘I know you’re right and I’m working on it,’ I said. Myrna raised an eyebrow as though that was ever in question. ‘But it’s hard to change the way you think when you’ve been thinking that way for a long time.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
Classic Myrna.
‘It really isn’t,’ she said. ‘You make a choice, darling, but it is a practice and you must commit to it every day. A girl can’t rely on having someone around to whisper sweet nothings in her ear from sunrise to sunset; it has to come from somewhere else.’
‘Instagram?’ I guessed.
‘Yourself,’ Myrna barked, hurling a tube of mascara in my general direction. She was surprisingly strong and impressively accurate for a woman in her eighties. ‘Do you think I care what other people say about me?’
‘I’m going to go out on a limb and say no.’
‘You are the only one who decides what’s true about yourself, no one else,’ she confirmed. ‘Well, you, a judge and a jury, but I’ll tell you what I told Jane Fonda. If you’re foolish enough to end up on the wrong side of the law, that’s on you. Now come here, so we can see what to do with you.’
Reluctantly, I eased myself off the chaise longue and sloped across the room, joining her in front of the mirror.
‘We’ll ignore your terrible posture because you’re doing that on purpose to vex me. When we first met, I told you I was too old to lie, and I haven’t gotten any younger since then so please listen up, I hate to repeat myself. I’ve met your Ren and, as far as I can tell, there is no discernible reason why he shouldn’t fall head over heels in love with that woman in the mirror.’
‘Are you talking about me or you?’ I asked, looking at our side-by-side reflection.
‘As much as it pains me to say it, you,’ she replied wearily. ‘I’m not going to sit here and list myriadwonderful things about you because it would be a waste of what’s left of my short and precious life. You already know them. But you think you’re protecting yourself by accepting someone else’s lies rather than believing your own truth.’
I watched my cheeks turn pink in the mirror.
‘Hurts, doesn’t it,’ Myrna said, sharp and precise. ‘The truth so often does.’
‘You could have a very successful second career on TikTok,’ I told her. ‘Tough Love with Myrna Moore.’
‘I’d rather scoop out my own eyes with a caviar spoon.’ She slapped my wrist with a paper fan. ‘And don’t think I don’t know when you’re trying to change the subject. How can you be so certain the boy’s heart doesn’t beat only for you if you didn’t give him a chance to tell you? And please don’t try to answer that because it was a rhetorical question. If you want him, speak up and claim him.’
‘You’re missing something here,’ I said. ‘However I might feel about him and however he might feel about me—’ She opened her mouth to speak but I kept going, risking my life to make my point. ‘Ren is spoken for. He’s with Bel now and there’s no way on earth I would ever do anything to hurt her, so I’m just going to have to learn my lesson and live with it.’
‘And you think you can, do you?’ Myrna asked. ‘Live with it, I mean.’
